Brief Report

Empirical Studies of the Arts

2020, Vol. 38(1) 24–32
The Development ! The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
of Creativity sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0276237419868958
journals.sagepub.com/home/art

Keith Sawyer1

Abstract
This article discusses the important scholarly contributions to our understandings of
creativity, education, and the arts. I describe many important contributions, begin-
ning with Dr. Ellen Winner’s foundational studies of child development and the arts
in the 1970s and 1980s. I identify several common themes throughout her career.
First, I characterize her work as problem finding in nature—exploring new areas and
identifying promising new research questions. Second, I discuss the interdisciplinary
nature of her work—describing the broad range of empirical studies she has con-
ducted, not only in the arts but also topics ranging from dyslexia to wisdom later in
life. Third, I summarize her important contributions to our empirical understandings
of the benefits of arts education. Finally, I describe the deeply collaborative nature of
her work, noting students and colleagues that she has published with.

Keywords
development, creativity, art education, arts integration, giftedness

Introduction
I am honored to participate in this celebration of Dr. Ellen Winner’s career.
Ellen’s research and writings have made a substantial impact on how we think
about art, development, cognition, and language. Throughout her career, she
has conducted and published research on an incredible range of topics, from her
early work on metaphor, irony, and jokes; continuing with major contributions
to our understanding of the arts, creativity, and learning; and with important

1
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Keith Sawyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campus Box, 3500, Chapel Hill, NC 27516,
USA.
Email: [email protected]
Sawyer 25

scholarship on dyslexia, handedness, Alzheimer’s, theory of mind, and many

more. Her career has been guided by a vision—that the study of art can reveal
insights into development and cognition. This vision runs through all of her
publications, from her first book to her latest. In her first book, Invented Worlds
(Winner, 1982), Ellen described her approach this way: “The arts are treated not
as forms of leisure, play, or amusement, nor as exclusively emotional activities.
They are viewed, rather, as fundamental ways of knowing the world” (p. 12).
And in her latest book, How Art Works (2018) she writes: “My goal . . . has been
to examine some of the most interesting questions and problems about the
psychology of the arts . . . My hope is that this effort helps to move their pursuit
in positive directions” (p. 245).
When I began my doctoral study of creativity and development in 1990,
I quickly discovered Ellen’s work. More than any other scholar, her research
was positioned at the same intersection of fields that I intended to pursue in my
dissertation research: developmental psychology, creativity and the arts, and
linguistics. I received my PhD in 1994, 25 years ago, and Ellen had already
made significant contributions to our scientific understanding of each of these
topics. Her writings played an important role in shaping the way I think about
creativity and development.
My dissertation was a study of children’s pretend play dialogues; I studied a
classroom of 3- to 5-year-old children, as they improvised fantasy scenarios. In
the sandbox, they improvised one-act plays where dinosaurs fought, died, and
came back to life. In the doll corner, they enacted family-life scenarios of babies
and older sisters. I took an approach that combined the interests of my two
faculty advisors—creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and linguistic
anthropologist Michael Silverstein—to explore the implications for creativity
and the development of social and conversational skills. Ellen had blazed this
same interdisciplinary trail, bringing together studies of metaphoric and figura-
tive language with the arts and cognition.
In Invented Worlds (Winner, 1982), Ellen says this about herself (although she
is characteristically humble, in using the passive voice):

“A psychologist of art is interested primarily in the psychological processes that

make possible the creation of and response to art. Two broad questions have
guided the psychological study of the artist. What motivates the artist to create?
And what cognitive processes are involved in creating art? Two parallel questions
have guided the investigation of the perceiver. What psychological factors motivate
a person to contemplate works of art? And what kinds of cognitive skills are
required to understand a work of art?” (pp. 8–9)

Throughout Ellen’s career, she has pursued these two questions and has given us
countless answers. She has been the most influential, the most creative, and the
most productive psychologist studying art.
26 Empirical Studies of the Arts 38(1)

Pursuing New Questions and Intellectual Connections

Ellen’s career demonstrates two intellectual practices that are associated with
greater creativity. First, she has taken a problem-finding creative path; second,
she has explored an interdisciplinary variety of research topics, increasing the
likelihood of insights that are based on remote associations.
In the 1960s and 1970s, creativity researchers had demonstrated that a
problem-finding creative process results in more surprising and more novel
innovations (e.g., Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976). In a problem-finding cre-
ative process, new research questions emerge while engaged in the work. In a
problem-finding process, the creator is receptive to the possibility of unexpected
developments and willing to reformulate the original problem to result in a more
interesting and potentially productive research question. Ellen cited this research
in her 1982 book: “Problem finding may be the trait that sets the truly creative
artist apart from the mediocre one” (Winner, 1982, p. 387).
Problem-finding creativity is often associated with an interdisciplinary
approach. Real-world phenomena do not honor disciplinary boundaries, and
when one pursues the process of inquiry that is inspired by a phenomenon—in
Ellen’s case, the development of children’s artistic creation and perception—one
is likely to find that the best questions and answers require insights from many
fields. Ellen’s skill at pursuing interdisciplinary work is evident from her
research and publication record, and this has contributed to her creative success.
Also in the 1960s and the 1970s, researchers had demonstrated that greater
creativity is more likely to result from remote associations than from close
associations (Mednick, 1962). Ellen knew of this work, as well. Again in her
1982 book, she wrote: “Creative artists are deeply engaged in multiple pursuits
at the same time, which enables them to see connections that were never seen
before” (p. 387). Ellen’s career is characterized by research and publication on
an unusually broad variety of topics. Her deep engagement with a broad variety
of cognitive material has no doubt enabled the remote associations that so often
lead to creative contributions.

Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts

In 1996, I was hired into my first faculty position, at Washington University, in
the Department of Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. I had room in
my teaching schedule to create a new course, so I decided to design a course
called Psychology of Creativity. Because my own dissertation studied creativity
and child development, I decided that the development of creativity would be a
core aspect of the course. I chose to use Ellen’s (1982) book Invented Worlds as
one of the two required books in the course. The other was Howard Becker’s
(1982) Art Worlds.
Sawyer 27

Invented Worlds explores the question: “How does artistic ability develop in
children?” In the Introduction, Ellen noted how little this question has
been studied:

The psychology of art lags considerably behind the psychology of other human
activities . . . there is no area of psychology in which a greater distance prevails
between what should be known and what has been established. It is in the hope
of beginning to close that gap that this book has been written. (p. 12)

Winner was inspired to write the book when she first taught a course on the
Psychology of the Arts, at Boston College. As she planned the outline of the
course, she discovered that there was no textbook that presented the findings
from Project Zero; no book-length overview of these new studies of artistic
thought and behavior. She noted this gap in her book’s introduction:

No one work integrated the various theories and content areas within the field.
This book was written to fill that gap. It is intended to answer the question that
I posed to myself as I planned my course, and that my students posed to me as
they wondered whether to register for the course: What is the psychology of the
arts? (p. ix)

While teaching with Ellen’s book, I better understood how profound was its
contribution. It is said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, and
while teaching my course, I became deeply engaged with the book. It was not a
simple textbook summary; it was sophisticated, analytic, and integrative. At the
same time, it was easy to read and organized around themes that made clear its
importance and impact.
Invented Worlds is an impressive work, with 431 pages, 82 illustrations, and
26 pages of references. One can infer how long it must have taken Ellen to write
the book: She taught her course in Fall 1978, and the book was published in
1982, so the book must have been written between 1979 and 1981. Finishing a
comprehensive book in only 2 years is an incredible feat. It demonstrates the
thoroughness, rigor, and clear writing that we see in all of Ellen’s publications. It
also demonstrates her productivity: At the same time, she was writing this book,
she published five journal articles or book chapters in 1979, two in 1980, and
four in 1981, and coedited a special issue of the journal New Directions for Child
Development (Winner & Gardner, 1979).

Scholarship Across and Within Disciplines

Ellen has always engaged with research in a variety of fields. Creativity research
has found that when a person works in multiple fields, it increases one’s ability
to make the remote associations that so often result in great creativity (Sawyer,
28 Empirical Studies of the Arts 38(1)

2012). At many points in her career, Ellen initiated new lines of research that
connected her previous work with new fields:

• 1993: Her first publication on giftedness (Winner & Martino, 1993). Only
3 years later, she published the book Gifted Children (Winner, 1996), and
in 2000, she wrote an overview of giftedness research for Current Directions
in Psychological Science (Winner, 2000)
• 2011: Her first paper exploring the question: Can people distinguish abstract
art from similar-looking paintings by children or by chimpanzees? (Hawley &
Winner, 2011; their empirical research demonstrated that the answer is yes.)
• 2001: Her first publication on dyslexia (Winner et al., 2001).
• 1990: Her first publication on handedness and hemispheric localization
(Casey, Winner, Brabeck, & Sullivan, 1990).
• 2004: Her first publication on Alzheimer’s (Zaitchik, Koff, Brownell, Winner,
& Albert, 2004).
• 1991: Her first publication on theory of mind, through studying people’s
understanding of irony and deception (Winner & Leekam, 1991).

In addition, her vita reveals that she experimented with many other research
questions, that emerged from remote associations, and that she did not pursue
beyond a single publication. Each of these publications might have served as the
beginning of a new career path, but instead, they are single intellectual experi-
ments in exploring new research questions. The broad scope of these titles gives
a sense of how wide-ranging Ellen’s interests have been.

• “How can Chinese children draw so well?” (Winner, 1989)

• “The relationship between sex, handedness, and college major” (Martino &
Winner, 1995)
• “The getting of wisdom: Theory of mind in old age.” (Happé, Winner, &
Brownell, 1998)
• “Flow and happiness in later life” (Collins, Sarkisian, & Winner, 2009)

It is hard intellectual work to study and master a new body of literature, to

understand that field sufficiently to identify an unanswered research question,
and then to invest the time to design an empirical study that makes a new
contribution. By repeatedly asking new questions and pursuing novel answers,
Ellen has mastered a continuing stream of new conceptual material, enabling the
many remote associations that we see in Ellen’s work.

Focus: The Arts and Academic Achievement

There is a widespread belief that education in the arts enhances
academic achievement in nonarts subjects. But this belief has rarely been
Sawyer 29

empirically studied. Given Ellen’s problem-finding approach, it is perhaps not

surprising that Ellen was one of the first to empirically study this question. In
this research, Ellen collaborated with Lois Hetland, a professor at the
Massachusetts College of Art. They called their collaboration the “Reviewing
Education and the Arts Project (REAP).” The first publications were in a 2000
special issue of Journal of Aesthetic Education (Winner & Hetland, 2000); the
issue contained several articles challenging the claim that there is a causal link
between arts participation and achievement in other school subjects. This special
issue contained Ellen’s first coauthored publication with Lois Hetland, titled:
“Does studying the arts engender creative thinking? Evidence for near but not
far transfer.” It contained another article coauthored by Ellen, with Monica
Cooper, titled “Mute those claims: No evidence (yet) for a causal link between
arts study and academic achievement” (Winner & Cooper, 2000).
In the context of Ellen’s problem-finding career, her shift to a new research
question was not unusual. But this time, the new research question seemed to be
a more dramatic change in direction, because in 20 years of prior research, Ellen
had demonstrated that artistic activity is grounded in the same cognitive pro-
cesses as other school subjects. From the 1970s through the 2000 REAP pub-
lications, Ellen’s research had been widely interpreted as providing evidence that
increasing mastery of art would lead to greater performance in other cognitive
domains. As a result, some of Ellen’s biggest fans were arts educators. Ellen
must have known that the REAP publications would be perceived unfavorably
by many of them. Her decision to pursue the facts wherever they led demon-
strated her courage and her commitment to scientific inquiry.
However, Ellen’s commitment to the value of the arts in education had not
wavered. In 2007, she coauthored the book Studio Thinking (Hetland, Winner,
Veenema, & Sheridan, 2007; also see Winner, Hetland, Veenema, Sheridan, &
Palmer, 2006). Studio Thinking demonstrated that she remained a strong sup-
porter of the arts in education while always grounding her position in rigorous
empirical research. Studio Thinking has been immensely influential in arts edu-
cation, and it provided a context to better understand the REAP publications.

Project Zero
Creative scientists rarely work alone; collaboration, culture, and social context
play an important role in creativity. Michael Farrell’s (2003) research on creative
circles explains how these collaborative teams drive the creativity of each par-
ticipant. Ellen’s career was deeply rooted in the creative circle of Harvard’s
Project Zero—founded by Nelson Goodman in 1967 to pursue cognitive
approaches to the arts. In the introduction to Invented Worlds, Winner acknowl-
edged the importance of Project Zero, and the influence of Howard Gardner,
Rudolph Arnheim, Roger Brown, Pavel Machotka, and David Perkins. At
Project Zero, from 1973 to 1975, Ellen was a research assistant in
30 Empirical Studies of the Arts 38(1)

Developmental Psychology. After receiving her PhD in 1978, and taking her
faculty position at Boston College, she continued her affiliation with Project
Zero as a research associate from 1978 to 1989.

“We Still Have So Much More to Learn”

In the 1970s, while pursuing her PhD at Harvard, Ellen met Howard Gardner,
and they were married soon after. They studied overlapping topics, although
they pursued independent scholarly careers. Of the 184 journal articles or book
chapters published since Ellen received her PhD (as of December 2017), just
over 25 were coauthored with Gardner, indicating a productive collaboration
while pursuing two independent scholarly careers. Their partnership is an exam-
ple of what Vera John-Steiner called a creative collaboration, in her study of
academic couples, including Marie and Pierre Curie, Martha Graham and Erick
Hawkings, and Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz.
In 2017, Ellen and Gardner coauthored a letter to the editor of Education
Week that speaks to their shared intellectual interests, titled “We still have so
much more to learn” (Gardner & Winner, 2017).

It will take many lifetimes to elucidate the nature of artistic knowledge and think-
ing; to determine how best to nurture arts teachers as well as general teachers; and
then to introduce young (and perhaps older) people to the arts . . . The effort is
worthwhile. Indeed, civilizations in the past are judged as much—if not more—for
their artistry than for their other achievements. (p. 27)

Ellen’s is one of those many lifetimes. Actually, Ellen’s career to date qualifies as
two or three lifetimes’ worth of scholarship: with 4 sole-authored books,
5 coauthored books, and 196 journal articles and book chapters, not to mention
coediting 9 journal special issues and giving hundreds of presentations (that
I counted in her December 2017 vita: Winner, 2017). I doubt that Ellen’s pro-
ductivity will end with her 2019 book How Art Works, because since 2012, in
addition to writing this book, she has written and published articles in leading
peer-reviewed journals, including Empirical Studies of the Arts, Developmental
Psychology, Educational Psychology, Cognition, Child Development, and Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology.
Ellen shows no evidence of retirement or even of slowing down. These recent
publications demonstrate that our edited volume is no end point; it is only a
small milestone in a career that will no doubt continue. I am grateful for this
opportunity to thank Ellen for the many gifts she has given to us and to
acknowledge the importance of her work to my understanding of the arts, cog-
nition, and development. I look forward to learning what her next research
question will be!
Sawyer 31

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Keith Sawyer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5410-461X

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Author Biography
Keith Sawyer is the Morgan distinguished professor in Educational Innovations at
the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He studies creativity, collabora-
tion, and learning. He has written over 120 scientific articles, and is the author or
editor of 17 books, including The Creative Classroom: Innovative Teaching for 21st
Century Learners (2019), with advice for teachers about how to foster creativity;
Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2nd edition, 2012), an
influential overview of creativity research, and The Cambridge Handbook of the
Learning Sciences (2nd edition, 2014), a seminal introduction to the scientific
research on learning.In his current research, he is studying how teaching and
learning are organized in professional schools of art and design, with the goal of
identifying a core set of features that can be used to design more effective learning
environments. As part of this research, he has conducted ethnographic studies of
the Savannah College of Art & Design, and of the Sam Fox School of Design &
Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.